I 



B 

331T 

.06 

L 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

The Dionysian Spirit 
of the Age 



A. R, ORAGE 





Glass _ 



Book 



J^ 



i 



^^ 



J 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 

THE DIONYSIAN 

SPIRIT OF THE AGE 

BY A. R. ORAGE 




NIETZSCHE 
BY MAX KLEIN 



By permission of the Editor of " The Studio'^ 



FRIEDRICH 
NIETZSCHE 

THE DIONYSIAN 

SPIRIT OF THE 

AGE 



A. R. ORAGE 




CHICAGO 

A. C. McCLURG & CO. 

EDINBURGH : T. N. FOULIS 
1 9 1 1 






; 



PRINTED BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH 



CHAPTER CONTENTS 



HIS LIFE 

page eleven 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS? 

^age twenty -five 



BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 

page forty-Jive 



THE SUPERMAN 

page sixty-seven 



NOTE 

Books of the Dionysian Spirit 

I>age eighty-two 



r 



PRINTED BY 

NEILL AND COMPANY, LIMITED 

EDINBURGH 



Art is the great stimulus to life. 
Noy life has not deceived me. I find it 
on the contrary year hy year more rich^ 
more desirable^ and more mysterious — 
ever since the day there came to me the 
great liberator ^ the thought that life 
might be an experiment for the seeker 
after knowledge; not a duty^ not a fatal- 
ity ^not a sham and a fraud. ^' Life as a 
means to knowledge'' — with this prin- 
ciple in one's hearty one can not only live 
bravely y but with joy and laughter. 
Courage saith^ ^^Was that life? Up I 
Once morel" 

Every great philosophy is finally a con- 
fession^ an involuntary memoir. 
A philosopher is a man who constantly 
tries y seeSy suspects^ hopesy dreams of ex- 
traordinary things ; who is struck by his 
own thoughts as if they came from with- 
out. 

For the thinker ^ success and failure are 
only responses. 

I praise all kinds of scepticism which 
permit me to reply : '^ Let us test it." 
BraveyUnconcernedyScornfulyViolent — 
thus wisdom would have us be; she is a 
womanandeverloveththe warrior only. 
2 9 



^ P H O 11 I S M S 

To vulgar natures all noble and gen- 
erous sentiments appear extravagant^ 
fanciful^ absurd^ unreasonable. 
As long as genius dwells within us we 
are bold^ nay^ reckless of life^ healthy 
and honour. 

If anything in me is virtue^ it is that I 
had no fear in the presence of any pro- 
hibition. 

Write with bloody and then thou wilt 
learn that blood is spirit. 
Let your work be a fight^ your peace a 
victory. 

Myself I sacrifice unto my love — and 
my neighbour as myself. 
He who is not a bird shall not dwell 
over abysses. 

By one^s own pain one's own knowledge 
increaseth. 

One must have chaos within to enable 
one to give birth to a dancing star. 
Only where there are graves are there 
resurrections. 



HIS LIFE 




Friedrich Nietzsche is the great- 
est European event since Goethe. 
From one end of Europe to the 
other, wherever his books are 
read, the discussion in the most 
intellectual and aristocratically- 
minded circles turns on the pro- 
blems raised by him. In Ger- 
many and in France his name is 
the warcry of opposing factions, 
and before very long his name 
v^ill be familiar in England. Al- 
ready half a dozen well-known 
English writers might be named 
who owe, if not half their ideas, 
at least half the courage of their 
ideas to Nietzsche. Ibsen seems 
almost mild by the side of him. 
1 1 



NIETZSCHE 

Emerson, with whom he had 
much in common, seems strange- 
ly cool : William Blake alone a- 
mong English writers seems to 
have closely resembled Nietz- 
sche, and he who has read the 
Marriage of Heaven and Hell^ and 
grasped its significance, will have 
little to learn from the apostle of 
Zarathustra. In other respects, 
however, Nietzsche is incom- 
parably more encyclopaedic than 
Blake or Emerson or Ibsen. He 
stood near the pinnacle of Euro- 
pean culture, a scholar among 
scholars and a thinker among 
thinkers. His range of subjects 
is as wide as modern thought. 
Nobody is more representative of 
the spirit of the age. In sum, he 
was his age ; he comprehended 
the mind of Europe. 
It is all the more significant there- 
fore that Nietzsche's main attack 
12 



OF HIS LIFE 

should be levelled against the 
foundations of European moral- 
ity. Yet nothing less bold and 
titanic was his declared task and 
mission. The greatest immoral- 
ist the modern world has seen, he 
needed the qualities he possessed 
in order to stand alone against a 
continent and the tradition of 
two thousand years. Passion was 
indeed the characteristic of his 
thought ; of the proverbial calm 
of the philosopher he had none. 
Great problems, he said, de- 
manded great love : and in his 
search for problems and solutions 
he was more a devouring fire than 
a dry light. There has been no- 
body more moving in literature. 
There are books that appeal to 
sentiment, books that appeal to 
the mind, and books that appeal 
tothewill. Nietzsche'sbelongto 
this last small but immortal sec- 

13 



NIETZSCHE 

tion. Nobody can read his books 
without receiving a powerful sti- 
mulus in one direction or another. 
There is something strangely sig- 
nificant of his own life in the title 
of his first book : the Birth of 
Tragedy, Wagner he named a 
stageplayer of the spirit ; but 
Nietzsche was the tragedian in 
the spiritual drama of Mansoul. 
H is very style is tragical and heavy 
withthe rustle of prophet'srobes. 
His voice now rises to a loud ex- 
ultant shout, and now drops to the 
sibilant hiss of the arch conspir- 
ator. Butthereisnotraceofbom- 
bast, the overblowing of little 
ideas with the wind of big words ; 
his matter is quite as tragical and 
moving as his manner. 
There isnothing diffuse or turgid 
in his style ; whoever expects to 
findCarlylean rhetoric will be dis- 
appointed. Out of the oppressive 

14 



OF HIS LIFE 

thunder-cloud of his thought 
come shooting at every moment 
splendidly bright aphorisms like 
forked lightning ; they are his 
thunderbolts carefully forged and 
shaped and sharpened. It is as an 
aphorist that he will live in liter- 
ature even should an emancipated 
Europe forget her moral war- 
riors. Heinemayberemembered 
as he wished to be remembered, 
for the brave soldier he was in the 
waroftheliberation of humanity. 
Ibsen is the splendid divisional 
general. ButNietzscheisincom- 
mand of the whole of the iron ar- 
tillery. Like them he knows his 
enemy; even better than they he 
knows where the enemy is weak- 
est. 

Of the outward life of this strange 
incarnation of European unrest 
thereislittletorecord. Thegreat- 
est events, he says somewhere, are 

15 



NIETZSCHE 

the greatest thoughts, the pro- 
duct of our stillest hours. 
He was born in 1 844 at Rocken 
near Lutzen in Saxony, and was 
of Polish descent on his father's 
side. This latter fact gave him a 
pardonable pride, for he remem- 
bered that the Pole Copernicus 
had reversed the judgment of a 
world ; that the Pole Chopin 
had challenged German music ; 
why should not the Pole Nietz- 
sche reverse the judgment of his 
world? In 1 845, when Fritz was 
only a year old, his father died 
from the effects of a fall. The 
family was taken to Naumburg, 
where, later on, Fritz was sent to 
the village schooj. As a boy, his 
sister tells us, he was very pious : 
and he seems to have had the rare 
desire to put his piety into prac- 
tice. This was always character- 
istic of Nietzsche. " We Nietz- 
16 



OF HIS LIFE 

sches/' said one of his aunts, 
"hate hes " : and lies for Nietz- 
sche always meant cowardice, 
and cowardice meant no more 
than the shirking of practising 
one's belief. We hear but little 
of him during the years 1845— 
58 : — a little dabbling in poetry, 
a good deal of serious work 
in music, a continual meditation 
on the problems to which later 
his life was to be given. In 
1858 he was sent to a school at 
Pf orta, and there in the following 
year he came into contact with 
the greatest emotional force of 
Germany at that day, Wagnerian 
music. He heard the magical 
music of Tristan and Isolde. 
That was the first real event of 
his life, the event that moved his 
soul to its depths. Henceforward 
he was a Wagnerian. But the 
passion thus stirred he turned 

17 



NIETZSCHE 

into the channels of his ethical 
thought. Though aesthetically 
moved, he was not content to re- 
main in the sterile region of pure 
aesthetics. His whole passion, 
says his sister, still lay in the 
world of knowledge, where it had 
now become a raging fire. In 
1865 he entered as a student at 
Leipsic University, where he be- 
gan his career as a professed stu- 
dent of classical philology. But a 
more important event than class- 
ical philology befell him there — 
he read Schopenhauer. Only one 
whose fortune brings him, after 
years of arid solitary thought, 
suddenly and as if by chance, in- 
to a world of thought and of men 
such as he has dreamed of but 
never realised, can understand 
Nietzsche'semotiononfirst read- 
ing Schopenhauer. Keats thus 
met Homer, and his wonderful 
18 



OF HIS LIFE 

sonnet is the record. Nietzsche's 
record is an exultation in impas- 
sioned prose. He felt, he said, as 
if every word in Schopenhauer 
was addressed directly and solely 
to him. There for the first time 
his eyes dwelt upon the sunlit 
region of art, upon a mind and a 
world such as he had dimly con- 
ceived and greatly dreamed. If 
in later life he threw aside one by 
one all the doctrines of Schopen- 
hauer, it was as a David might 
put away the weapons of Saul 
— only because he had proved 
them. In 1868 he met Wagner 
in person, and the two became 
fast friends till the fatal year 
1876, when with an enormous 
effort Nietzsche began to break 
away from the master, who, he 
thought, had played the rene- 
gade. From 1869 to 1880 he 
held the Chair of Classical Phil- 

19 



NIETZSCHE 

ology at Basel. In 1 872 his first 
book was published — the Birth 
of Tragedy. It was dedicated to 
Wagner, and is the acknowledg- 
ment of Nietzsche's debt to art. 
But already he began to see the 
new world, his own world, open- 
ing before him. His next books 
were a series of notes on moral 
origins, in which we see him 
digging about the foundations of 
men's good and evil, cautiously, 
carefully, but unflinchingly. In 
1 8 7 6, from his break with Wag- 
ner, he began deliberately to place 
himself at the head of the moral 
reformation of Europe. What- 
ever personal considerations may 
have entered as excuses , his quar- 
rel with Wagner was inevitable 
from thepublication of Wagner's 
Parsifal. Of that work Nietz- 
sche could scarcely speak with 
toleration. It was for him the 
20 



OF HIS LIFE 

death -knell of his hopes, and 
henceforth Wagner was the head 
and front of his abomination. 
By 1880 Nietzsche's health had 
so declined that he was compelled 
to resign his chair at Basel. Nine 
years he spent in travelling in 
Italy and Switzerland, where he 
meditated and wrote his later 
books. In 1885 his Zarathustra 
was published. This marks the 
final period of Nietzsche's pro- 
ductive life. It was the period of 
the Superman. From the time 
the idea of a splendid type of hu- 
manity came to him as the re- 
deeming creation of a world of all 
too human men, Nietzsche be- 
lieved and ever grew in the belief 
.that his mission was to preach 
Superman. Already in 1876 his 
friends had observed that he 
placed an extraordinary import- 
ance on his work ; but from the 
21 



NIETZSCHE 

birth of Zarathustra Nietzsche 
conceived the idea that he was no 
less than the avatara of the spirit 
of humanity. In a brilUant essay 
he describes the consciousness 
such as the genius of humanity 
may be supposed to enjoy, the 
complete and ever present know- 
ledgCj memory and rich experi- 
ence, of all ages and times, the 
visions and plans of all the future. 
And wild as the notion may seem, 
there is little doubt that Nietz- 
sche had risen to something like 
this height. 

In 1889 the final blow came 
which shattered the lamp of 
Nietzsche and threw in the dust 
the brightest intellectual light 
that Europe knew. A period of 
severe hallucinatory delirium led 
on to complete dementia : the 
enormous strain of thought sus- 
tained at white heat during a 
22 



OF HIS LIFE 

period of thirty years broke down 
at last a brain which after all was 
human and fragile. Nietzsche 
passed out of sight of men, and 
died a few months later without 
recovering sanity. 



The existence of the world can be justi- 
fied only as an esthetic phenomenon. 
Spirit is that life which itself cutteth in- 
to life. 

The secret of a joyful life is to live dan- 
gerously. 

Life is whatever must surpass itself 
Two things are wanted by the true man 
— danger and play. 

How is freedom measured ? By the re- 
sistance which has to be overcome ; by 
the effort which it costs to retain superi- 
ority. 

Throw not away the hero in thy soul. 
Te are permitted to have enemies who 
must be hated^ not enemies whom ye can 
despise. 

become what thou art. 
Tragedy — the dream-world of a T)io- 
nysian ecstasy. 

Everything that suffereth wanteth to 
live in order to become ripe and gay and 
longing. 

Men must require strength; otherwise 
they never attain it. 
A good war halloweth every cause. 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS? 




Whoever wishes to understand 
Greek culture, said Nietzsche, 
must first penetrate the mystery 
of Dionysos. The statement is 
equally true if we substitute for 
Greek culture Nietzsche him- 
self. The secret of Nietzsche is 
the secret of Dionysos. It was 
through the gateway of Greek 
tragic art that Nietzsche found 
his way into his own world : and 
all his originality and daring, as 
well as his excesses and contradic- 
tions, become intelligible when 
once his tragic view is seized. 
In his study of Greek art, Nietz- 
sche was struck by a fact which 
hadpuzzledmanythinkersbefore 
3 25 



-< 



NIETZSCHE 

him. Why did the Greeks, the 
bUthest and best constituted race 
the world has ever seen, need such 
a tragic art as theirs ? For they 
were not emotionally asleep, nor 
was it as a medicinal purgation of 
soul that they sufiFered tragedy. 
On the contrary, they were a 
highly impressionable,profound- 
ly aesthetic people, and the evi- 
dence shows them deeply moved, 
yet greatly rejoicing, in the tragic 
drama. Yet what need had they 
of tragedy ? It is plain from the 
form of the question that Nietz- 
sche's conception of art was not 
the ordinary conception. The 
art of a people was not to be ac- 
counted for by their whims and 
fancies ; it was to be determined 
by need. What does not spring 
from necessity is not art. Unless 
a people need art as they need 
bread, how can their art be great \ 
26 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS? 

But to satisfy what imperious 
need did the Greeks create tra- 
gedy ? 

Nietzsche found the solution 
of the problem in the myth of 
Apollo and Dionyscs : and the 
antithesis he there discovered he 
afterwards employed in art, liter- 
ature, philosophy, morality, and 
life itself. Mythology, he saw, 
was no less than the spiritual his- 
tory of a people, the records of its 
moods, its periods of spiritual 
doubt, despair, and triumph. In 
the story of the coming of Diony- 
sos into Greece, of the resistance 
of Apollo, and of the final recon- 
ciliation, Nietzsche saw the out- 
lines of spiritual movements my- 
thically veiled, the phases of 
the myth corresponding to his- 
toric phases of the Greek mind. 
The coming of Dionysos was a 
popular movement of ideas : the 
27 



J^A 



NIETZSCHE 

resistance of Apollo was a popular 
movement of conservatism : the 
reconciliationwas a compromise. 
Regarded in this way, the myth 
becomes history of the most in- 
timate nature, and records the 
history of the Greek soul during 
several centuries. 
All the more interesting is the 
story to us on account of the essen- 
tial similarity between ancient 
GreeceandmodernEurope. The 
issues involved in the struggle of 
Apollo and Dionysos are the same 
now as then. In truth, as Nietz- 
sche discovered, the way to the 
modern world is through the por- 
tals of the ancient wisdom. 
Thespiritual condition of Greece 
during the period immediately 
preceding the Dionysian awak- 
ening was comparable to the spir- 
itual condition of Europe during 
the eighteenth century. Greece 
a8 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS? 

was Apollan in the sense that 
Europe was religious. The long 
established Apollan cult was fast 
becoming a convention. Now 
that the Titans, the elemental 
forces of wild nature, were van- 
quished, and the Gods had no 
more enemies, Olympos, the 
bright and splendid Olympos, be- 
gan visibly to fade. Great Zeus 
himself was nodding on his 
throne. Religion, morality, art, 
life itself, were losing their hold 
on men, and Greece was threat- 
ened with the fate of India. 
Then it was that there came into 
Greece from the north, the home 
of spiritual impulse, a new power 
in the form of Dionysos. That 
its leader was a Thracian, that he 
brought with him the secret of 
wine, music, and ecstasy, that 
he was instantly welcomed by 
women, and that the movement 
29 



NIETZSCHE 

so inaugurated began rapidly to 
spread over Greece — all this is 
clear enough even in the secular 
story. But the spiritual issues 
were infinitely greater. For Di- 
onysos and the Dionysian spirit 
were everywhere in open and di- 
rect antagonism with everything 
ApoUan. The whole structure 
of the Greek mind under Apollan 
influence was threatened at every 
point by the attacks of the Diony- 
sians. Its modes of thought, its 
religion, its morality, its art, its 
philosophy, its very existence, 
were challenged. In comparison 
with all that Greece had so far 
been, the Dionysian movement 
was revolutionary, irreligious, 
immoral, barbaric, and anarchic. 
The reception of such a move- 
ment by the Apollan Greeks may 
easily be conceived by modern 
Europeans. Howevertheymight 
30 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS? 

secretly feel the attraction of the 
splendid virility of the new move- 
ment, they could not but pause 
before accepting doctrines which 
flew in the face of accepted estab- 
lished customs. It was true that 
the established customs were 
stale, that Olympos was fading, 
that Greece was dying ; but the 
admission of Dionysos, with his 
train of ecstatic women, wild 
men, and still wilder doctrines, 
seemed a remedy w^orse than the 
disease. 

Placed once more in a position of 
necessity, Apollo girded himself 
forthefight: and the conservative 
forces for a while succeeded in re- 
pelling the Dionysian invaders. 
Thus, by a curious reaction, the 
very element that threatened to 
destroy, served in fact to streng- 
then and renew. 
But such an effect did not pass un- 

31 



NIETZSCHE 

noticed among the Greeks. It 
would be absurd to suppose that 
many individual Greeks were 
clearly awareoftheproblems they 
were facing. Spiritual move- 
ments are conscious in the minds 
of only a few, but they have their 
home in the mind of the race. 
The question that now presented 
itself was this : remembering 
Olympos at war with Titans, 
Oly mpos at rest and dying of rest, 
and Olympos renewing its youth 
in war with Diony sos, was it pos- 
sible,was it really true, that Olym- 
posneededan enemy, that conflict 
was indispensable to Olympos ? 
Sworn deadly enemy of Apollo as 
Dionysos might be, could Apollo 
really live without him ? Might 
not Dionysos, the eternal foe, be 
also the eternal saviour of Apollo ? 
The question was afterwards put 
by Nietzsche in myriads of forms. 
32 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS? 

The whole of his work may be 
said, indeed, to be no less than the 
raising of this terrible interroga- 
tion mark. He divined and stated 
the problem for modern Europe 
as it had been stated for ancient 
Greece. He asked Europe the 
question which Greece had al- 
ready asked herself, and which 
Greece had magnificently an- 
swered. For theanswer of Greece 
is recorded in her Tragic Mys- 
teries. In Greek tragic drama the 
answer of the Greek mind to the 
momentous question is a splendid 
afHrmative. Not Apollo alone ; 
not Dionysos alone ; but Apollo 
and Dionysos. — What wdll be 
Europe's reply ? 

Before, however, consideringany 
further the meaning of Greek tra- 
gedy, it is advisable to glance 
briefly at the issues involved in 
the eternal antagonism. While, 

33 



NIETZSCHE 

in their human aspects, Apollo 
and Dionysos may stand respect- 
ively for law and liberty, duty and 
love, custom and change, science 
and intuition, art andinspiration : 
in their larger aspects they are 
symbols of oppositions that pene- 
trate the very stuff of conscious- 
ness and life; they are its warp and 
woof. Thus Apollo stands for 
Form as against Diony sosf or Lif e ; 
for Matter as against Energy; for 
the Human as against the Super- 
human. Apollo is always on the 
side of the formed, the definite, 
the restrained, the rational ; but 
Dionysos is the power that de- 
stroys forms, that leads the defin- 
ite into the infinite, the unre- 
. strained, the tumultuous and pas- 
sionate. In perhaps their pro- 
foundest antithesis, Dionysos is 
pure energy (which Blake, a thor- 
ough Dionysian, said was eternal 

34 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS ? 

delight) 5-^ while Apollo is pure 
form, seeking ever to veil and 
blind pure energy. 
Life, as it thus appears to the eye 
of the imaginative mind, is the 
spectacle of the eternal play and 
conflict of two mutually opposing 
principles : Dionysos ever escap- 
ing from the forms that Apollo is 
ever creating for him. And it is 
just this unceasing conflict that is 
the essence of life itself ; life is con- 
flict. Dionysos without Apollo 
would be unmanifest, pure en- 
ergy. Apollo without Dionysos 
would be dead, inert. Each is ne- 
cessary to the other, but in active 
opposition : for, as stage by stage 
the play proceeds, Apollo must 
build continually more beautiful, 
more enduring forms, which Di- 
onysos, in turn, must continually 
surmount and transcend. The 

^ See Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 

35 



NIETZSCHE 

drama of life is thus a perpetual 
movement towards a climax that 
never comes. ^ Apollo never will 
imprison Dionysos for ever : Dio- 
nysos never will escape for ever 
from Apollo. Only, as in the early 
stages of life, Dionysos begins 
by speaking in the language of 
Apollo ; Apollo will, in the later 
phases, learn more and more to 
speak in the language of Diony- 
sos. Life itself will become Di- 
ony sian as the eternal conflict pro- 
ceeds. 

In the Greek drama, Nietzsche, 
as has been said, found at once the 
problem and its solution. For 
what could life have meant to the 
spectators of the plays of Aeschy- 
lus and Sophocles? What but the 
tragedy of the eternal strife, the 

1 For the perfect expression of this period of 
Greek culture, and particularly of this fun- 
damentally tragic and pessimistic concep- 
tion, see Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, 

36 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS? 

recognition of the essential tra- 
gedy of life itself 5 the spectacle of 
a never ending world-drama in 
which the gods played ? For the 
tragic Greeks, life was the Dio- 
nysian will-to-renew, at war with 
the Apollan will-to-preserve ; life 
was intelligible only as an aesthetic 
spectacle ; there was no finality, 
no purpose, no end, no goal ; only 
the gods played ceaselessly. And 
the business of man was to assist 
at the spectacle and in the play. 
As a joyous spectator-actor he 
should enter into the strife, con- 
sciously aiding the unfolding of 
the eternal drama, of which he 
himself was both Dionysos and 
Apollo. For, as the world-drama 
is in truth the drama of mind, so 
the interior nature of the indivi- 
dual is the stage on which it is 
played. 
The perception of this truth by 

37 



NIETZSCHE 

the Greeks was the signal of the 
reconcihation of Apollo and Dio- 
nysos. As at Delphi, the home of 
Apollo, the priests of Dionysos 
were formally admitted with 
their train of ceremony and festi- 
val ; so in the life of the race and 
in the minds of the Greeks them- 
selves the reconciliation took 
place. Henceforth, Greek cul- 
ture was the child of both Dio- 
nysos and Apollo. And in the 
Tragic Mysteries was revealed to 
the spectator an image of the life 
of the world. On the stage he be- 
held Dionysos and the Dionysi- 
fied struggling against the Apol- 
lan powers of Fate and Death. 
The Greek needed to behold that 
struggle. He needed to be con- 
stantly reassured that life was of 
this nature. Profoundly as he 
might and must sympathise with 
the sufferings of Apollo, he could 

38 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS? 

not but sympathise even more 
deeply with the agonies of Diony- 
sos. Yet in the end he could not be 
mortally distressed. For he felt 
that, fierce and terrible as the con- 
flict was, real and moving as the 
painsof the tragedy mustneedsbe, 
itwasthegame^theplay^theceles- 
tial life of gods that he was wit- 
nessing. To rise to the height 
where he might joyfully behold 
the game without ceasing for an 
instant to feel the pain and sorrow 
of it all ; to rejoice with Dionysos 
victorious, and yet to mourn with 
Apollo slain ; to assist in his own 
life the great drama by welcom- 
ing all that promised struggle ; 
finally 5 to will with all his soul the 
increasing triumph of Dionysos, 
that life and joy might be all in all 
— such was the meaning of Tra- ^ / 
gedy among the Greeks. ^ 

When Nietzsche had reached 

39 



\ 



NIETZSCHE 

this conclusion, he turned to the 
closer examination of his own 
Europe. In the music of Tristan 
and Isolde he heard, or thought he 
heard, the old Dionysian strains. 
He believed that Europe was 
about to enter, through Wagner, 
into a repetition of the spiritual 
history of the Greeks. Dionysos, 
he thought, had come to Europe. 
And if the events in Greece were 
toberepeated in Europe, we were 
already on the threshold of the 
new era. With Dionysos at our 
gates, and the spirit of joy, free- 
dom, excess ; the spirit of pure 
energy, the old cry of life desir- 
ing to renew itself — how could a 
chosen disciple of Dionysos be 
silent ? Nietzsche threw himself 
into the struggle, even as he be- 
lieved Dionysos, the spirit of life 
itself, had already done. For was 
not Dionysos 

40 



APOLLO OR DIONYSOS? 

" . . . . The spirit of the years to come, 
Yearning to mix himself with life ?" 

Later, he regretted having mis- 
taken Wagner for a genuine Dio- 
nysian, and reflected that the 
Dionysian swans of his enthusi- 
asm were no more than geese. 
But he never doubted that the his- 
tory of the Greeks was about to 
be repeated. Failing Wagner, he 
himself would be the Dionysian 
initiator. He would transform 
Europe, and deliver men's minds 
from the dull oppression of Apol- 
lo. He began from that time the 
enormous labour of turning the 
Dionysian criticism on the whole 
fabric of European civilisation. 
If he is so largely negative in his 
efFects,thecauseisnottobesought 
so much in him as in the times. 
Positivedoctrineshehad in abun- 
dance. Later in life he deplored 
the negations into which he had 

4 41 



NIETZSCHE 

been led. But the work of under- 
mining the foundations of mod- 
ern thought occupied too large a 
part of a comparatively brief life. 
Hence we see in his work more of 
the struggle and less of the tri- 
umph of Dionysos. Even in this 
it is Greek history repeated, for 
Dionysos also wasdefeatedatfirst. 



All that is good makes me productive. 
I have no other proof of what is good. 
Decadence art demands Salvation ; 
beautiful and great art expresses Grat- 
itude. 

In order that a sanctuary may he created^ 
a sanctuary must he broken down. 
All that is done for love is done beyond 
good and evil. 

If man would no longer think himself 
wicked he would cease to be so. 
Life would be intolerable but for its 
moral significance ? But why should 
not your life be intolerable? 
^^ Autonomous " and '^moral " are mut- 
ually preclusive terms. 
What is bad ? All that proceeds from 
weakness. 

Whoever liveth among the good is 
taught to lie by pity. 
No goody no evil, but my taste^for which 
I have neither shame nor concealment. 
The Christian resolve to find the world 
evil and ugly has made the world evil 
and ugly. 

That your self be in your action as a 
mother is in the child, that shall be for 
me your word of virtue. 

43 



Morals are perpetually being trans- 
formed by successful crimes. 
On the day on which with full heart we 
say: ^' Forward^ march! our old mor- 
ality too is a piece of comedy V — on 
that day we shall have discovered a 
new complication and possibility for the 
Dionysian drama of the ^fate of the 
souiy 



"BEYOND GOOD AND 
EVIL" 




When Nietzsche found himself 
on the other side of Dionysos he 
found himself on the other side 
likewise of Good and Evil. These 
terms, as ordinarily employed, 
ceased to have any value for him ; 
but their meaning was greater. 
His book, under the strange title 
Beyond Good and 'Evil ^ was at once 
a challenge and an attack on mor- 
ality. Such an attack cannot fail 
at first sight to appear wild and 
criminal in the extreme. And 
Nietzsche was thoroughly well 
aware of this. It is quite unne- 
cessary to plead any extenuation, 
or to make it appear that Nietz- 

45 



■?5!r??! 



NIETZSCHE 

sche was playing a part. Nobody 
was ever more serious ; he set his 
whole mind on the task of destroy- 
ing morality, root and branch. 
He challenged not merely this or 
that item of the current code, he 
desired to annihilate the very 
conception of the code. He was 
not merely immoral, he aimed 
at being unmoral, super-moral. 
Morality was to be completely 
transcended. 

In the space of this chapter it will 
be impossible to outline more 
than a few of the leading ideas of 
Nietzsche's theory. And first, 
what is the nature of the morality 
against which he thunders and 
lightens ? It is no easy matter to 
define Morality, and Nietzsche 
himself made more than one un- 
successful attempt. The two es- 
sential elements, however, of any 
system of morality are, first, the 

46 



^^ BEYOND GOOD & EVIL" 

scheduling of certain actions, 
thoughts, and desires as Good, 
andofothersasEvil ; andsecond- 
ly, the addition of a religious 
sanction, whereby good actions 
become stamped with divine ap- 
proval, and bad actions with di- 
vine disapproval. 
Against these two elements Niet- 
zsche therefore directed his crit- 
ical guns. Regarding the first 
element, the classification of ac- 
tions into good and evil, Nietz- 
sche's line of attack was to show 
what may be called the natural 
history of such classifications. 
Every nation, every individual, 
every organism, must by its very 
nature make a choice among 
things. An individual, in fact, is 
constituted and defined by its se- 
lective power. But it does not at 
all follow, because an individual 
or nation must choose and select, 

47 



NIETZSCHE 

that the choice and selection are 
advantageous to it. Over and over 
again we have seen individuals 
choosing and selecting not what 
is good for them, but what is bad 
for them. Compelled to judge, 
they are by no means compelled 
to judge rightly : and since na- 
tions and peoples are no less fal- 
lible than individuals, it follows 
rthat the value of every code of 
morality which embodies a peo- 
ple's judgments is to be judged 
by another standard than the 
^ code itself. 

The interrogations which Nietz- 
sche places against every code of 
morality are in essence these : Is 
this morality conducive to the 
ends proposed ? Is this people 
mistaken in its judgments ? Are 
its good and its evil really good 
and evil for its spiritual welfare ? 
But the answer to the question 
48 



^^ BEYOND GOOD & EVIL" 

depends upon another question 
— the value of the people whose i 
judgment is being considered. 
We ordinarily discount the value 
of the judgment of inexperienced 
persons. The judgments of the 
young and the old, for example, 
are often diametrically opposed. 
The judgments of a people as old 
as the Chinese are very different 
from the judgments of, say, the 
modern Americans. In consider- 
ing the value of a moral code we 
have, therefore, to inquire into 
the value of the people which 
created it. How came they to 
invent just such a code ? IV/iy did 
they name this action good, and 
that bad ? Again, were they mis- 
taken ? 

In approaching this problem 
Nietzsche makes use of a capital 
distinction. All life, he says, 
is either ascendant or decadent. 

49 



NIETZSCHE 

Every organism, whether an in- 
dividual, a people, or a race, be- 
longs either to an ascending or a 
descending current. And its mo- 
rality, art, form of society, in- 
stincts, and in fact its v^hole mode 
of manifestation, depend on 
v\rhether it belongs to one or the 
other order of being. The prim- 
ary characteristic of the ascend- 
ung life is the consciousness of 
/inexhaustible power. The indi- 
vidual or people behind which 
the flowing tide of life-force 
moves is creative, generous, reck- 
less, enthusiastic, prodigal, pass- 
ionate : its virtues, be it observed, 
I are Dionysian. Its will-to-power 
is vigorous ; in energy it finds 
delight. And the moral code of 
such a people will reflect faith- 
fully the people's power. 
But the primary characteristic 
of the descending life is the con- 
50 



-^BEYOND GOOD & EVIL" 

sciousness of declining power. 
Theindividualorpeopleinwhom 
the life-force is ebbing instinc- 
tively husband their resources.! 
They are preservative rather than 1 
creative, niggardly, careful, fear- 
ful of passion and excess, calcu- 
lating and moderate. And, in 
turn, their code of morality faith- * 
fully reflects their will. 
Looking thus upon any morality 
as no more than a symptom of 
the physiological condition of a 
race, the question of good and 
evil is in realij;y irrelevant. No 
symptom, as such, can be either' 
good or bad. A morality express- 
es the judgments of a people, its 
diagnosis of its own health, its 
self-decreed regimen. And as 
such it may be — mistaken ! 
But Nietzsche discovered an- 
other division in moralities. Ac- 
cording as the code of morality 

51 



NIETZSCHE 

current among a people origin- 
ated in the ariatooiacy or in the 
mob, he named the moraUty 
Noble-moraUty, or Slave-moral- 
ity. Doubtless, in aristocratic 
communities such as those in 
Europe, the disparity between 
the moral codes of the aristocracy 
and the democracy is very great, 
amounting in many respects to 
simple contrast. But, as Nietz- 
sche himself says, even the most 
aristocratic communities are not 
aristocratic in the real sense. 
" Mob at the top, mob below," is 
his description of Europe. Thus, 
his aristocratic or noble-morality 
mustnotbeequatedwiththemor- 
ality of noblem en and the wealthy 
classes, nor his slave - morality 
with that of the democracy. If 
the division is of any value i t must 
be applied to the personality, and 
not to possessions or position. In 
52 



" BEYOND GOOD & EVIL" 

this sense there is a world of dif- 
ference between the code of mo- 
raHty of the noble-minded man 
and the code of the mean and the 
petty-minded. Nietzschecarries 
the distinction into the furthest 
fields. Noble-morality, he says, 
is classic morality, the morality 
of Greece, of Rome,of Renais- 
sance Italy, of ancient India. 
But Christian morality is slave- 1 
morality in excelsis. For the 
essence of Christian morality is 
the desire of the individual to 
be saved ; his consciousness of 
power is so small that he lives in 
hourly peril of damnation and 
death, and yearns thus for the 
arms of some saving grace. The 
Christian, in fact, seeks a master, 
as all slaves must : and in lieu of 
a real master, he will invent for 
himself imaginary masters. But 
the essence of noble-morality is 

53 



NIETZSCHE 

the desire to command, the will 
to be master, the idea of freedom, 
the sense of power, gratitude to- 
wards life, and the realisation of 
the privileges of responsibility. 
Of any code of morality, there- 
fore, Nietzsche has this further 
question to ask : In what class of 
I mind did it originate ? Whose 
valuation of thingsdoesit express, 
the valuation of thenoble mind or 
of the slave mind ? 
It will be seen that these and the 
questions before named go to the 
roots of the problem of Morality. 
Every people has thought that its 
morality was right, that its Good 
was good for ever, its Evil evil for 
ever. But the comparative study 
of moralities begun by Nietzsche 
already begins to demonstrate the 
fact that there is in reality no ab- 
solute Good, no absolute Evil. 
Of nothing is it any longer pos- 

54 



.^^/■^ 



" BEYOND GOOD & EVIL" 

sible to say : This is Good every- 
where and always ; that is Bad 
everywhere and always. Good 
and Bad must be determined on 
every occasion af resh, and always 
in relation to a definite purpose, 
by which alone anything can be 
either good or bad. " Only he 
who knoweth whither he saileth 
knoweth which is his fair wind 
and which is his foul wind." 
Thus in one sense Nietzsche's 
Beyond Good and Evil is no more 
than a criticism of the absolute 
values of these concepts. He 
seeks to give to Morality the idea 
of relativity, which by this time 
has been given to all other human 
institutions : not Good and Evil 
as if things were these absolutely, 
but Good and Bad in relation to 
a definitely conceived end. 
But, as we have seen, the absol- 
ute idea is well-nigh essential to 

ss 



NIETZSCHE 

Morality. How can unquestion- 
ing obedience be claimed for laws 
which themselves are open to 
question ? And this authority is 
given by the association of moral- 
ity with religion, or rather with 
theology. On theology, there- 
fore, Nietzsche levels his second 
attack. 

Every dominant code of morality 
has naturally endeavoured to se- 
cure the support of every power 
in the state. ''All instincts aspire 
to tyranny." Not only are the sec- 
ular powers of legal punishment 
ranged on the side of a popular 
morality^butthetheologicalpow- 
ers as well. From whatever class 
the code of morality has issued, 
and to whatever type of life the 
community has belonged, the 
code has been declared divine as 
wellashuman. Thishasproduced 
some strange inconsistencies, as 

56 



" BEYOND GOOD & EVIL" 

when the same God is appealed to 
on behalf of both parties to a war. 
But the essential fact is that a code 
of action^in order tobecomeamo- 
rality at all, must have religious 
sanction. Destroy the religious 
sanction, and the moral code falls 
to the level of taste and expedi- 
ency. It becomes a rational in- 
stitution, of no more significance 
and of no more authority than the 
ordinary law of the land, or than 
therulesof etiquette. Itis,infact, 
by the assistance of the religious 
sanction that a code of manners 
becomes a code of morality. 
Now Nietzsche is far from deny- 
ing the right of a community to 
add the terrors of theology to the 
terrors of the law on behalf of its 
code. But the value of the code is 
thereby not increased; nordohu- 
man laws which win a theological 
sanction become necessarily in- 

5 57 



NIETZSCHE 

fallible. As a matter of fact, there 
are examples in history of codes of 
morality sanctioned by the pre- 
vailing theology which proved 
ruinous to the community. May 
it not be that our code of morality, 
sanctioned as itis by our theology, 
will prove ruinous to us ? 
In any case the support of theol- 
ogy is paid for dearly. Suppose 
that every Act of Parliament were 
declared to be the will of God, and 
that men believed them to be the 
will of God, ("belief and fact are 
by no means synonymous, ' ') such 
Acts would continue tobe,as they 
are, fallible and imperfect. Of 
that there is no doubt. But the 
very belief in their infallibility 
and sanctity wouldparalysemen's 
efforts to alter and improve them. 
Instead of the sensible recognition 
thatinstitutionsandordinancesof 
men are in their very nature tern- 

58 



" BEYOND GOOD & EVIL" 

porary and expedient, we should 
have in the sphere of ParHament- 
ary laws the intolerable dogma of 
the eternal nature of human law. 
But this is exactly the price paid 
for the elevation of manners into 
morality by means of theology. 
Theology universalises. When 
once a human law has taken to it- 
self a divine sanction, it ceases to 
be capable of regarding itself as 
temporary, fallible, particular 
in its application, questionable — 
in short, human ! Morality ceases 
to be human, and becomes divine 
— and inhuman. The proper and 
necessary classification which so- 
ciety must make of good things 
and bad things, of things to be al- 
lowed and of things to be forbid- 
den, of things to be praised and 
of things to be condemned, — this 
sensible and necessary classifica- 
tion of things according to apur- 

59 



NIETZSCHE 

pose which society has in mind 
becomes the very instrument of 
society's destruction just so soon 
as these tentative, partial, and ex- 
perimental classificationsbecome 
universalised, theologised, and 
petrified. Thereafter it is diffi- 
cult even for society itself to revise 
itsjudgments. Every philosopher 
who lays hands on the moral code 
becomes by the act itself both a 
criminal and an impious heretic. 
The noblest service a man can 
render his generation, namely, to 
exchange its false goods for real 
goods, becomes a service that he 
can render only at peril to his life. 
By morality sin came into the 
world ; for the price of morality 
is sin and crime. 

A parallel effect of theology on 
manners is to raise to the position 
of absolute power the particular 
valuation which has chanced to 
60 



" BEYOND GOOD & EVIL" 

become relatively dominant. It 
has already been said that the the- 
ological sanction has at different 
times been accorded to the most 
opposite codes of morality. In 
Europe, according to Nietzsche, 
the code of manners which se- 
cured theological sanction issued 
from the slave caste. Asmorality, 
howxver, it becomes universal ; 
and as universal, it fits only those 
who are temperamentally similar 
to the founders of the code. As 
these are in a small minority, the 
universalising of the code forces 
on the maj ority in the community 
a system which is either too great 
or too small for them. It is thus 
mostcertainly true that conform- 
ity to the moral code, while diffi- 
cult, nay, impossible to many, is 
easy, and fatally easy, to others. 
Thus in some it produces hypo- 
crisy, cant, humbug, and other 
6i 



NIETZSCHE 

symptoms of an over-heavy bur- 
den of responsibility ; and in oth- 
ers, deadly indifference, ennui, 
and pessimism. For it is asking 
too much of vulgar natures that 
they shall act as noble natures : 
and it is asking too little of noble 
natures that they shall act as vul- 
gar natures. Yet no less than this 
universalism is implied and in- 
volved in the elevation of a Good 
and Bad into a universal Good and 
Evil. 

Nietzsche has much more to say, 
but here we are following the 
main lines only. His final conclu- 
sion is, as we have seen, the need 
to transcend Morality ; in other 
words, to dismiss from our minds 
the conceptions of Good and Evil 
as absolute things, and to substi- 
tute for them the human valua- 
tions Good and Bad. With the 
theological concepts of Good and 
62 



" BEYOND GOOD & EVIL" 

Evil would go also the theological 
machinery of those concepts, the 
idea of Sin, of the need for Sal- 
vation, the idea of divine pun- 
ishment, the bad conscience, the 
sense of guilt, remorse .... 
all the degenerate instincts, the 
negative instincts. 
What w^ould take their place 
would be the sense of responsibil- 
ity, or rather the privilege of re- 
sponsibility, and the will to create 
for the future, unhindered by the 
dead hand of the past. 
But the questions : Good for 
what ? Bad for what ? remain as 
yet unanswered. When we have 
abolished Good and Evil, ceased 
to believe in a divine will, and 
declared that man alone and his 
purposes are writ in the world — 
what then ? Has man any goal 
by which he may judge of things 
whether they are Good or Bad ? 

63 



I 



NIETZSCHE 

No measurement is possible with- 
out a standard. Man must meas- 
ure^but by what shall he measure ? 
Shall he measure all things by 
their power to produce happi- 
ness ? We shall see in the next 
chapter Nietzsche's standard. It 
is his positive doctrine, the crown 
and the justification of all his crit- 
icism and destruction. His goal 
is The Superman. 



^^ 



There is no harder lot in all human fate 
than when thepowerful of the earth are 
not at the same time the first men. There 
everything becomes false ^ and warped^ 
and monstrous. 

Man is a something that shall he sur- 
passed. What have ye done to surpass 
him ? 

What is great in man is that he is a 
bridge^ ayid not a goal. 
He who would create beyond himself 
hathy in mine eyes^ the purest will. 
Freedom is the will to be responsible for 
oneself 

Who would not a hundred times sooner 
fear — if at the same time he might ad- 
mire — than have nothing tofear^but at 
the same time to be unable to rid him- 
self of the loathsome sight of the ill- 
constituted^ the stinted^ the stunted^ and 
the poisoned ? 

Dead are all gods; now we will that 
Superman live. 

To women: Let your hope be^ ^^ Would 
that 1 might give birth to Superman.'' 
Man is a rope connecting animal and 
Superman — a rope across a precipice. 
A thousand goals have existed hitherto^ 

65 



^ P H 11 I S M S 

for a thousand peoples existed^ hut the 
one goal is lacking. And if the goal he 
lacking^ is not humanity lacking? 



THE SUPERMAN 




There are two possible ends to- 
wards which to make progress 
consciously : the earthly end, and 
what Nietzsche has called the 
other-worldly end. In the absence 
of any positive knowledge of the 
nature or even the existence of 
any future life, it is folly, Nietz- 
sche declared, to train a race by 
morality, religion, and all the 
other instruments of education 
for a future of which we can know 
nothing. For what we do know, 
we may, however, make ourselves 
responsible. And the certain 
thing is, that humanity lives, has 
lived, and will continue to live on 
the earth. Hence the problem 

67 



NIETZSCHE 

is, in Nietzsche's words, to deter- 
mine what type of man we are 
to cultivate, to will, as the more 
valuable, the more worthy of 
life, and certain of the future, 
here upon the earth. 
The fact that mankind has hither- 
to been hopelessly divided be- 
tween thepagan and the religious 
end, so that every attempt to en- 
sure one future has been frus- 
trated by the attempt to ensure 
the other — the familiar paradox 
known asmaking the best of both 
worlds — this fact has kept hu- 
manity gyrating on its axis. Of 
progress we have almost lost the 
meaning. For progress is only to 
be determined in relation to a 
goal, and two goals are as bad as 
none at all. 

As a positive human and earthly 
goal Nietzsche therefore put for- 
ward his concept of the Super- 
68 



THE SUPERMAN 

man ; a concept which has be- 
come famous and notorious in 
about equal degree. It is in Thus 
spake Zarathustra that the out- 
lines of the Superman, as Nietz- 
sche conceived him, may best be 
seen, and in the portrait of the 
coming race there sketched we 
may dimlysee Nietzsche's vision. 
Remembering that Nietzsche 
denied any purpose in nature 
other than man's will, the crea- 
tion of the Superman may not 
be left to chance. The modern 
doctrine of evolution has in this 
respect misled many people 
into supposing that men may 
fold their arms and still pro- 
gress. Evolve — that is, change 
from one state to another — 
they may and must ; but evolu- 
tion is by no means identical with 
progress. Thus the Superman, 
if he is to appear at all, must be 

69 



NIETZSCHE 

willed — in plain words, must be 
bred. 

The net product of the wills of 
past humanity — namely, present 
humanity — Nietzsche could not 
but regard as inadequate to the 
demands of the imagination. 
" Man is no more than a bridge. ' ' 
As a bridge and a means to an end 
man is tolerable, but as the end 
and crown of earth Nietzsche 
felt that man was contemptible. 
Hence his scorn for all those who 
desired to preserve man as he is. 
Not to preserve man, but to sur- 
pass man, was, he said, the aim of 
the genuine reformer. 
The question, however, arises — 
What type of being is the Super- 
man ? Merely to say that he will 
be as much nobler than man as 
man is nobler than the ape and 
the tiger, is to leave a great deal 
to the imagination. That he will 
70 



THE SUPERMAN 

be man, and yet Superman, is 
clear ; but whether he will (or 
shall — for it is a question of what 
man shall will) be man magnified 
many times is not so clear. Sev- 
eral writers on Nietzsche (both 
tacit and avowed) have put for- 
ward a Superman differing very 
little from persons of extraordi- 
nary common-sense. Common- 
sense, we know, is always es- 
oteric ; but the possession of 
common-sense, even in an extra- 
ordinary degree, scarcely divides 
Superman from man, as man is 
divided from the tiger. 
The truth is, Nietzsche himself 
found it impossible really to de- 
scribe the Superman. He could 
no more foretell what the Super- 
man would be than the Jews could 
describe their Messiah. The 
Superman and the Messiah are, 
in fact, very similar, and it is 

71 



NIETZSCHE 

possible that Nietzsche, in this 
respect, had borrowed his idea 
from the PoUsh Messianist, Slo- 
wacki. But by means of nega- 
tives it was possible for Nietzsche 
to define what the Superman 
was not. 

To begin with, the Superman, 
he said, had never existed on 
earth. The names, therefore, of 
Cassar, Napoleon, and the rest are 
out of court. He did define Na- 
poleon as "half Superman, half 
beast," but we are left in doubt 
which half of Napoleon was the 
beast. Then, too, it is safe to say 
that Nietzsche'scomingphiloso- 
phers, described in Beyond Good 
and Evil^ the Dionysian spirits 
who shall redeem man, are not 
themselves Supermen. These he 
foresaw in a period not very far 
off^; but the Superman may be 
supposed to lie in a more distant 
72 



THE SUPERMAN 

future. Moreover, it is as a pre- 
liminary and preparatory race 
that the philosophers must come. 
In humanity, at this moment, 
there are not only no Supermen, 
but there is not enough intelli- 
gence and will to make Supermen 
possible. We have first to develop 
a caste of mind that shall be quali- 
fied to undertake the creation of 
a superior race. In one sense the 
Church has been such a caste, 
with such an end; only, the race 
it has sought to create is an other- 
worldly race. The Church, said 
Nietzsche, has always been the 
arch-traitor of earth. 
Finally, there was in Nietzsche's 
conception of the Superman a 
good deal of mysticism, with 
which he himself was scarcely 
in conscious sympathy. In the 
opening chapters of Thus spake 
Zarathustra he describes the 

6 73 



NIETZSCHE 

three metamorphoses of the 
spirit, under the names of the 
Camel, the Lion, and the Child. 
From his description it is evident 
that the spirit of man is now only 
at the Camel stage. Man is a 
beast of burden. But, as one by 
one the camels are laden and go 
into the solitary desert, they be- 
come transformed into lions. 
And Nietzsche's description of 
his coming race of philosophers is 
"laughing lions." But the Super- 
man is the child. In his nature 
all the wild forces of the lion are 
instinctive. He will not seek wis- 
dom, for he will be wise. Man 
will have become as a little child. 
The psychology of these meta- 
morphoses is too profound to be 
stated here ; but nobody who 
understands Nietzsche will doubt 
that behind all his apparent ma- 
terialism there was a thoroughly 

74 



THE SUPERMAN 

mystical view of the world. As 
already said, Blake is Nietzsche 
in English. 

It follows from this that the 
Superman is strictly indefinable. 
As man is not merely a tiger writ 
large, so Superman is not merely 
man writ large. It is probable, 
indeed, that new faculties, new 
modes of consciousness, will be 
needed, as the mystics have al- 
ways declared ; and that the dif- 
ferencing element of man and 
Superman will be the possession 
of these. 

But since they are, from the na- 
ture of things, unknown except 
to the few, the task of creating a 
race such as may tromise well is 
all that remains to society. For, 
in the long-run, it is impossible to 
divide the powers of the mind 
from the powers of the body. 
" All mind finally becomes vis- 



NIETZSCHE 

ible." Individually and in a few 
cases it may be true that noble 
mindsaccompanydiseased bodies, 
but the rule is obviously the re- 
verse. Wereit not so, the whole 
of our hygiene, education, even 
our reason itself, must prove pure 
delusion. 

Hence every end that man con- 
ceives for the race must be solid- 
ly built on the sensible world. 
Whatever the Superman maybe 
psychologically, there is no doubt 
that physically he must be cap- 
able of living on the earth. To 
create, therefore, a race of men 
capable of enjoying life, capable of 
entering fully and ever more fully 
into the life of this earth, such 
was Nietzsche's proposal. Only 
by the creation of such a race 
would the long and bloody toil of 
hundreds of centuries and count- 
less generations be justified. For 

76 



THE SUPERMAN 

when we have praised our famous 
men, and our fathers that begat 
us, and have said in our hearts, 
Surely we are the people, and 
wisdom will perish with us — 
what, after all, is it ? Was it sim- 
ply for these, for us, that the uni- 
verse laboured during myriads 
of years? Are we really the 
flower, the ultimate blossoming 
of a Becoming whose stages were 
marked by the constellations and 
warmed by solar fires ? Was it 
simply to produce here and there 
a great man (and him "human, 
all too human") amid millions 
and millions of the mediocre, 
the dull, the unhappy ? Such a 
thought burned the brain of 
Nietzsche. With something like 
the feeling with which we may 
conceive the Spirit of Humanity 
beholds us, Nietzsche cried : " Is 
this all? Up! Again!" 



NIETZSCHE 

Though it was only after he had 
been writing for some years that 
Nietzsche discovered his Super- 
man, his mind had really turned 
round the conception as its pivot. 
In the Superman he found the 
answer to the Dionysian ques- 
tion : How can life be surpassed? 
His Beyond Good and £w7 was a 
mapping out of the sphere in 
which the Superman might 
dwell. And his later works were 
a continuation of the task he had 
unconsciously set himself of at- 
tacking and destroying the ob- 
stacles in the way of Europe's 
realisation of the Superman. 
The justification of Nietzsche's 
iconoclasm is, indeed, to be 
sought in this his positive idea. 
Profoundly and passionately 
moved by issues which the vast 
majority are content to ignore, 
Nietzsche's attack on morality 

78 



THE SUPERMAN 

was not simple lust for destruc- 
tion. So long as the idea of the 
absolute Good and the absolute 
Evil prevailed, and men feared to 
will lest they should incur the 
punishment of sin ; so long, in 
fact, as the world was regarded 
from the priest's standpoint, with 
innocent causes as sinners, and 
innocent consequences as execu- 
tioners, so long was it impossible 
that men should be persuaded to 
become responsible for them- 
selves and their future. A super- 
imposed and tyrannical Goodand 
Evil makes cowards of men, and 
forbids their saying, " w)/ good ; 
my h^d.'' 

The substitution, however, of a 
definite human purpose for a 
vague indefinable " divine " pur- 
pose, while it destroys morality, 
really creates a Supermorality. 
Henceforth it becomes possible 

79 



NIETZSCHE 

to estimate the values of things in 
precise terms. 

"Who keeps one end in view 
makes all things serve." And the 
concept of the Superman, as the 
goal of human progress, immedi- 
ately lays the foundation of a 
scientific revaluation of all the 
instruments of education. 
It was precisely this " Revalua- 
tion of All Values" in the light 
of the Superman that Nietzsche 
was beginning when his brain 
finally gave way. The book in 
which he was to record his judg- 
ments of things, to mark down 
their values for the coming race, 
and to provide for Europe a 
guide, as it were, to the creation 
of Superman, was also to be his 
master-work. It should be his 
great affirmation, the answer to 
the problem, that terrible ques- 
tion, with which the tragic 
80 



THE SUPERMAN 

Greeks so nobly wrestled : How 
may life be enabled to become 
ever and ever more moving, 
more splendid, more Dionysian? 
Nietzsche's answer was no other 
than the Greek answer : by 
making life more tragic, by the 
enlargement of the will of man, 
— by conflict with gods ! 



NOTE 

'Books oj the Dionysian Spirit 
Unique as Nietzsche supposed 
himself to be, there are neverthe- 
less other writers who have both 
seen and solved the Nietzschean 
problem of morality, and in the 
same way. The older distinctions 
of such writers can no longer, 
however, be said to hold, for 
pagan does no more than place 
them in antithesis to Christian ; 
and their special view really tran- 
scends the one equally with the 
other. "Dionysians"istheword 
employed by Nietzsche to de- 
scribe the writers of his type; and 
now that the word is in general 
use on the Continent among en- 
lightened minds, and is moreover 
in prospect of becoming familiar 
to the few in England, chiefly 
through its use by Mr Bernard 
Shaw, we cannot perhaps do 
better than employ it. For the 
82 



NOTE 

following list of what may there- 
fore be called Dionysian writers, 
the students of Nietzsche may 
perhaps be glad. Needless to say, 
of course, the list does not profess 
to be comprehensive : — Blake, 
Sir Richard Burton, Samuel But- 
ler, Bunyan, Byron, Cervantes, 
Professor W. K. CHfford, Dostoi- 
efFsky, Emerson, Goethe, Heine, 
Ibsen, JefFeries, Machiavelli, 
Pater, Rabelais, Rochfoucauld, 
Stendhal, Sterne, S wif t,Thoreau, 
Whitman, Oscar Wilde. Among 
living authors the following may 
be named Dionysian : — Dr 
George Brandes, G. Bernard 
Shaw, W.H.Hudson (author of 
The Purple Land that 'England 
Lost ; Green Mansions^ etc.) , R. B. 
Cunninghame Graham, Maxim 
Gorki, H. G. Wells, Edward 
Carpenter, W. B. Yeats. 

A. R. O. 



AUG 30J8I1^ 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 815 839 5 



ml 




k 



